“We American college teachers”

This is quite a remarkable passage In Rorty's Universality and Truth lecture. Understand it, and you better understand his total weltanschauung.

"The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire 'liberal Establishment' is engaged in a conspiracy…These parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with our fundamentalist students than do kindergarten teachers with their students…When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian Scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank…The racist or fundamentalist parents of our students say that in a truly democratic society the students should not be forced to read books by such people—black people, Jewish people, homosexual people. They will protest that these books are being jammed down their children's throats. I cannot see how to reply to this charge without saying something like 'There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we liberals have been making steadily more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. You have to be educated in order to be a citizen of our society, a participant in our conversation, someone with whom we can envisage merging our horizons. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.' I have no trouble offering this reply, since I do not claim to make the distinction between education and conversation on the basis of anything except my loyalty to a particular community, a community whose interests required re-educating the Hitler Youth in 1945 and require re-educating the children of southwestern Virginia in 1993..."

— Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism by Richard Rorty
https://a.co/3psrY57